spiked93%
Why Labour’s ‘Summer of Sex will leave most of us cold 90%
By Gawain Towler98%
7/24/2026, 3:05:44 PM
Topics: Politics
Keywords: Labour Party, Love And Sex
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Pessimism Bias, and Politically Left Leaning Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 80.2% saturation with 756 hits. Analysis detected 3,441 faulty-reasoning hits from 943 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 82.8% and a BS Rank of 90% (2,340 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 89.30% of the article peer group.
Picture the seaside postcard.
A blushing vicar, a landlady with a rolling pin, and a Labour MP on the promenade asking passers-by if they fancy a ‘summer of sex’.
Kiss me quick, squeeze me slow, and mind the goodie bag.
Donald McGill would have drawn it in an afternoon and been prosecuted by teatime.
Samantha Niblett, Labour MP for South Derbyshire, has instead launched it as official parliamentary business, and nobody so much as confiscated her easel.
There are, at a conservative estimate, 47 things wrong with Britain that a Labour MP might usefully spend her summer on.
The small boats.
The big taxes.
NHS waiting lists now longer than the pier at Southend.
Ms Niblett has surveyed this landscape of national dilapidation and decided that what the country is really gasping for is lifelong sex education, launched this week at a rooftop bar above the Oxford Street John Lewis, in partnership with that department store and with Coco de Mer, purveyors of luxury erotica to duchesses and hedge-fund wives.
There were canapés.
There were Aperol spritzes.
There were goodie bags of intimate bodycare products, handed out with the solemnity of a school prize-giving – ooh matron – and all of it in the name of the workers.
Ms Niblett reports that colleagues who were sniffy at first are now ‘on a journey’, which is what politicians say when the people who disagreed with them have not yet surrendered but will be made to.
The women’s parliamentary Labour Party WhatsApp group was less biddable.
Terse comments flew, she flounced from the chat, and sisterhood was pronounced dead at the scene.
Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, contributed the immortal assurance on LBC that she personally owns no sex toys, each to their own – a denial no one had requested and which the nation will now never be able to unhear.
Somewhere in Manchester, a Rampant Rabbit is consulting its lawyers about defamation by omission.
So to the first question, the one nobody asked between spritzes: why is she doing this at all, apart from the publicity?
Strip away the bunting and the campaign is a whelk stall with no whelks.
The stated aims dissolve into a mist of consultation.
She is speaking to stakeholders (vampire fantasies are clearly out).
She is pulling together a briefing document.
She has secured an autumn debate at which she will reveal what it is she actually wants, a striptease of policy in which each veil comes off to disclose another veil.
The one firm commitment is to bring sex toys into the Palace of Westminster.
This has been cleared by the parliamentary authorities, who presumably checked Erskine May under B and found nothing.
Meanwhile, Grindr is fixing her up with Madonna.
Condé Nast is procuring Harry Styles, who has his own sex-toy range to flog.
If you can explain how any of this helps a 15-year-old in Swadlincote understand consent, you are a subtler mind than mine, and possibly than hers.
The second question is the one that undoes her, and it is a question of class.
If you sincerely believed the British public needed help with its love life, and you felt compelled to take a sponsor from the pleasure trade, the choice is obvious: Lovehoney.
Bath-based, cheap and cheerful, the Argos of eros, where the actual nation actually shops and the sale rail offers honest devices at honest prices, buy one get one free, no questions asked and none answered.
That is saucy-postcard Britain, the Britain of the caravan park and the naughty weekend in Skegness, the Britain Labour was invented to serve.
Ms Niblett chose Coco de Mer.
I declare an interest.
I am a stranger to neither firm, and the Coco de Mer shop at 24A Motcomb Street remains a wonder of understated decadence, sin sold in scented tissue paper.
But let us be honest about the clientele.
This is a boutique for people to whom money is a rumour.
Its current collection includes the Crave Vesper 2, a vibrator necklace plated in 24-carat gold, £285 to you, madam.
Two hundred and eighty-five pounds.
A month’s food shop.
Three winters’ worth of woolly socks.
In a cost-of-living crisis, the party of the people has hoisted a gold-plated butt plug as its campaign standard, jewellery you can wear to the food bank and enjoy on the way home.
Marie Antoinette only offered cake, and at least cake is filling – well, I suppose so are these toys, in a manner of speaking.
This is Labour in miniature.
Founded by miners and Methodists, now fronted by people whose notion of the common touch is a Knightsbridge boutique and a rooftop spritz, a party that has not so much lost the working class as had it discreetly removed, like a tattoo from a previous relationship.
The postcard version of Britain they are pastiching was at least honest about itself.
It knew that sex was funny, private and free – three qualities entirely absent from this campaign.
And the pity is that underneath the gold plate sits a real subject.
Doctors too embarrassed to raise sexual health, patients whose illnesses wreck their intimate lives, boys marinated in porn.
A serious campaign would deserve a serious hearing.
Instead we got a launch party.
The summer of sex will end as all such seasons end at the English seaside, in drizzle, deflation and a long queue for the facilities.
As the deputy leader would say, each to their own.
Just not, please, at our expense.
Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.
Analysis
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